Many of you were kind enough to read my entry Dressing Up Box already, but if you want to read it again - or you missed it - there's a teaser below and you can read the full piece here.

Opening Excerpt from Dressing Up Box by Lily Childs:

Swivel.

Awkward, I turn to pick at the flesh adorning my wardrobes, and sigh. The dance has left me ragged; exhausted from the relentless flamenco. Elegant feet I had chosen especially, bleed in stinging shreds. I have worn them to calluses. Yeast stinks between the slender toes.

A fine week’s work.

Ruining beautiful things is part of the pleasure.

Yesterday’s body was squat and dark, an aged gypsy. I slough off the old man’s skin, marvelling at the bruises incurred from seven solid days of stamping and click, click, clicking of heels. Yellowed stains litter the shins and I poke them hard, revelling in the pain before grasping the blackened feet that I pull off like old shoes; the toes broken and seeping with infection.

Spin.

Today I am a ballerina, wanting the fairy tale. In a drawer there are pink-ribboned slippers, full of meat.

Magenta Shaman

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About Lily Childs

Writer of horror and chilling fiction. Author of The House of Three - a short ghost story, Cabaret of Dread - a horror compendium, Courting Demons - a collection of dark verse and the urban fantasy Magenta Shaman short story series.
Multiple short stories published in anthologies such as The Demonologia Biblica, The Bestiarum Vocabulum, The Grimorium Verum, Bones, Fresh Fear, Thirteen, Daily Bites of Flesh, JWK Fiction Best of Horror 2013 and more.
Editor of February Femmes Fatales, a collection of dark and wicked words from twenty-three women writers.
Owner of Ganglion Press, a small platform for publishing dark fiction and crime in print and ebook formats.
Co-Editor at the former Thrillers Killers 'n' Chillers ezine.